Postwar Sex Education and the Roots of White Male Sexual Entitlement

Donald Trump’s boasting to Billy Bush about forcing himself on women is evidence of rape-supportive behavior alive and well today, although it’s the type that young men purportedly outgrow. Teenagers and college students who rape, the thinking goes, have exercised poor judgment and will learn from their mistakes. Take, for example, Brock Turner. In June 2016, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced the Stanford University student, widely identified in the press as a champion swimmer, to what was effectively a three-month stint in county jail for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. During the sentencing, Turner’s father objected to the “steep price” his son would potentially pay for “20 minutes of action,” and Persky accepted Turner’s admission of remorse. In other words, these men viewed sexual violence as an act of youthful indiscretion that should be readily forgiven and forgotten.

If the millions of accounts of women’s first assaults, prompted by Kelly Oxford’s #notokay hashtag, reveal the pervasiveness of sexual violence, the Brock Turner victim impact statement provides a gut-wrenching and detailed account of a rape and its aftermath. The statement’s author drew attention to the lingering prevalence of rape myths, the callous treatment of victims by the judicial system, and how race and gender privilege all too often advantage middle-class and wealthy white men. The relationship between male privilege, white privilege, and elite white men’s relative impunity for enacting violence against women builds on a history of sexualized power. Examining several artifacts of mid-century sex education sheds light on how we arrived at this place, where white men too commonly evade consequences of sexual aggression even as campaigns to end sexual violence proliferate.

Mid-century sex education emerged as a successor to social hygiene campaigns of the turn of the twentieth century. Progressive Era social hygienists debunked the notion of male sexual necessity, the idea that men needed a sexual outlet to avoid physical or psychological harm. Educators asserted that abstaining from intercourse and masturbation would not cause adverse effects in men. Yet popular belief in the ubiquity and urgency of male desire for women persisted, as did the notion that men were more sexually excitable than women. Men might pursue sexual liberties, the logic went, and women, with their supposedly lesser interest in sex and greater stake in preserving their purity, would check them. As scholars and critics of rape culture remind us, such sexist and gendered scripts persist.

The conception of modern, civilized, respectable, and mature male sexuality that emerged at the start of the twentieth century presented middle-class white people as the pinnacle of sexual decency. Black, indigenous, and immigrant communities might aspire to such status, but racist and ethnocentric presumptions of uncontrollable sexuality and degeneracy all but prevented their obtaining it. As Jim Crow, nativism, and assimilation campaigns reinforced white supremacy, U.S. sex educators focused on guiding young people’s attitudes about sex toward a concept of normality and heterosexual compatibility. By mid-century, sex education instructed adolescents about normative heterosexual ways of being in modern America using upstanding white people to make the case. Role models included high school athletes and white-collar professionals, people who might earn athletic scholarships, graduate from a prestigious university, attend law school, and join the country club.

Along with paying attention to sex (e.g., sexual anatomy and reproduction), post–World War II sex education imparted guidance related to gender (e.g., puberty, gender expression, and heterosocial relationships believed to be complementary). In so far as the lessons jettisoned old-fashioned ideas—masturbation as causing mental disturbance, menstruation as a sickness or curse, and men and women as complete opposites—they imparted accurate and helpful information. Students learned in the classroom that heterosexuality was a normal and welcome aspect of human relations for men and women. By custom, they learned that boys were the proper initiators of dates and sexual activity, whereas girls’ job was to respond. With titles such as How Much Affection? (1958), movies and pamphlets granted that teen romance might include intimacies such as necking and petting, and that such activity, in a committed relationship, would not necessarily ruin teenage girls’ reputations. (Of relevance is the fact that the median age of first marriage for girls dropped to 20 in this period.) Boys could experiment sexually in their youth—sow a few proverbial wild oats—and retain the option of settling down with a nice girl.

The sex education movie Human Growth, released in 1947 to resounding popular acclaim, set the tone for the relatively new pursuit of sex education in the schools. Viewed across the country by an estimated two million school children, the movie opens by exhibiting a white, middle-class family in their living room, talking about the son’s homework in preparation for the following day’s lesson, beginning with a superficial discussion of the customs of an unnamed Indian tribe. The viewing experience begins, then, by positioning the learners and teachers of sex education as white exemplars of normalcy. People of color remain passive objects of study, as the Native Americans fixed in time on pages in a book, or altogether invisible.

The film in part legitimizes sex education by depicting the enterprise with an all-white cast. In addition to the opening home scene, the classroom presents a poised teacher and well-mannered students who view and then discuss an animated movie—a film within a film—about growth and reproduction. Gender stereotypes abound in the movie, whether at home or in the verbal description of puberty. Just as important, white women and girls occupy central roles: Josie represents the preview committee, and Miss Baker (not Mr. Baker or even Mrs. Baker) leads the class. A male voiceover for the growth and reproduction lesson provides gender balance.

Human Growth was one of many postwar teaching resources that recognized girls and boys’ commensurate needs for sex instruction. As I argued in Sex Goes to School, educators increasingly rejected the sexual double standard of the past. Positing that society should judge men and women comparably in matters of sex was a gesture toward equity and fairness. Yet presenting women as subjects and not just objects of sexuality did and does little to challenge white male entitlement to sexualize and expect access to girls and women. At worst, this entitlement enables young college men to prey on incapacitated women, as illustrated by the Brock Turner case, The Hunting Ground, and Jon Krakauer’s Missoula.

Without promoting predatory sexual behavior, mid-century sex education did, in at least one instance, get frank with boys about the normative desire to “score” with girls. As Boys Grow, a 1957 educational movie made by Medical Arts Productions, offers relatively shame-free encouragement for white boys to discuss and own their sexuality in the masculine space of the locker room. Narrator and coach Gene Douglas instructs track team members about puberty, masturbation, and more. In a scene featuring two adolescent boys talking to one another, one kid says to another: “Hey, you know something, I had a wet dream last night.” While this is laugh out-loud funny to YouTube viewers of the film, it probably also similarly struck audiences in the 1950s as awkward, amusing, and unrealistic. Still, it provides a memorable opening to further consideration of, as the narrator puts it, “this business of nocturnal emissions.”

Impromptu lessons in the gym follow, where the coach has handy charts and anatomical drawings ready to illustrate his talk about puberty, erections, and intercourse. The ever-moderate and approachable coach speaks candidly, acknowledging male desire with first-person phrases such as “when something excites us sexually.” He clarifies that masturbation is when “you cause an ejaculation by yourself . . . rubbing the penis.” To alleviate fears about self-stimulation, the actor admits that “sometimes you hear that masturbation affects your mind, or your manhood. It isn’t true. For kids your age, it’s just something normal.”

Persuading boys that their erections and their desire for sexual stimulation were “completely normal,” and even universal, was a bold—we might even say sex-positive—message likely to lessen youthful concerns about sexual development. Yet such a lesson was only conceivable for white, heterosexually inclined boys. There was no girls’ equivalent; menstrual education films of the era, such as The Story of Menstruation (1946), assiduously avoids questions of sexual desire as has so much sex education for girls ever since. Plus, it was only white boys’ sexual interests in girls that were normalized here. Not once did mid-century sex education materials offer affirming representations of non-white sexual pleasure or entitlement, nor was same-sex attraction among boys or men presented favorably. Explicit sexual license was exclusive to white male desire for girls.

In our current efforts to grapple with the problem of sexual assault—on college campuses and elsewhere—our focus on accounts of victimization and women’s experiences is absolutely necessary. What thinking further about sex education, historically and currently, might add to this conversation is scrutiny of what has enabled (and limited) male sexual prerogatives over time. Long abandoned is the premise of male sexual necessity, and female chastity has fewer champions than in the past. Yet we have more documentation than ever that men of all ages, particularly privileged white men, continue to engage in predatory sexual behavior with minimal consequences. We see them surrounded by family, friends, teammates, coaches, lawyers, and others who are ready to champion their utter goodness and hopeful futures, Trump’s diminishing number of apologists notwithstanding. How and why we continue to deny and excuse predatory behavior and come to see it as normal is a question of great urgency.

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